Great design can elevate everyday objects. Surely we've all said, "I don't care what it does, I want one" at one time or another. But it can't end there. There are socio-economic factors, historical references, aesthetic theories, and neuroscientific principles inherent in the design process. Simply put, there's more to design than meets the eye.

And that's what they teach at ArtCenter College of Design in Southern California, which has trained designers since 1930. Prominent alumni are everywhere, from Apple (Clement Mok) and Nike (Martin Lotti) to Tesla (Franz von Holzhausen) and NASA (Jessie Kawata).

PCMag went to ArtCenter's campus in Pasadena to tour the creative labs. As you might expect, the setting itself is inspiring: a glorious steel-and-glass 1960's-era fabrication, high up in the San Rafael Hills, stretched over an arroyo in 165 acres of lush woodland.

Once inside, the diverse and mostly monochrome-clad student body roam hallways dotted with bright, glass-enclosed spaces full of Computer Numeric Control machines, 3D printers, film and photo studios, and the CMTEL (Color, Materials, and Trends Exploration Lab). Even the vending machines are cool. While other schools have sugary snacks and sodas, ArtCenter sells protective masks, xacto replacement blades, and tiny human figures to place inside scale models of concept dwellings.

There are also shiny fiberglass vehicular prototypes on display in the lobby exhibition area; for decades, ArtCenter has been the place to train as an automotive designer.

Stewart Reed, chair of Transportation Design, is an ArtCenter graduate who has held posts at Chrysler and Toyota's Calty Design Research studio. He's worked on everything from special-mission military vehicles for Lockheed to the Cunningham C7 GT concept coupe, and described ArtCenter as "an engineering test-bed, as well as a futuristic design studio."

ArtCenter has "faculty here that represent every major car company in the world, and we do everything to equip students for the future of transportation," Reed told PCMag. "We take into account all 3D design issues from safety requirements, assessing aerodynamic flow using computational fluid dynamic tools—it's amazing what you can do even with underbody dimension shaping—and acoustics, aerothermal, sustainability and so on, right down to developing materials for the ultra light personal mobility vehicle."

Students take on multiple internships and industry-sponsored projects. "Last term was to imagine an expressive new vehicle, out into the future, for Maserati, in 2030," Reed explained. "Our students looked at everything from hot hatches, high performance, down to entry level and out into pure autonomy, for next-generation products.

"Many times we're working with the car brand's advanced design studios, or the actual headquarters putting cars into production on a rolling basis, like BMW in Munich," he said.

Karen Hofmann, chair of Product Design and another ArtCenter grad, also has an automotive background. She started her career at Johnson Controls' Automotive Systems Group and worked with clients like Lego on a concept vehicle. But there's been so much demand from industry in the wearables space that Hofmann decided to launch a new Wearables and Soft Goods program this year.

"It all came out of the shoe design workshops we'd been asked to do in Portland, which lead to discussions on the quantified self and, naturally enough, to soft goods and onto the whole wearable tech sector.

"Basically, we've blown it up, building out a full curriculum, hiring more instructors, bringing in industrial sewing machines, turning out athletic/performance apparel, devices, and prostheses for the sports and health industries, with wearable tech embedded in its very fabric," Hofmann said. "Collaborations are coming in fast, we've done work with Qualcomm and we're now working with UCLA bioengineering teams."

A recent project was an industry-sponsored wearables concept from HTC. Students were challenged to develop a wearable that enabled people to "share emotion," deepen intimacy, and communicate connection.

"Bear in mind that many of our students are young, around 22, and maybe, culturally, aren't that, well, experienced," laughed Hofmann. "So for many of them it was a challenge. Some of the teams focused on using wearables to develop healthier relationships at work—others looked at lovers separated by distance, or, you know, pure hooking up—it ran the gamut."

HTC was particularly enamored by one of the five submissions. Project Apollo—by Dailyn Kim, Tetsugaku Sasahara, Jeansoo Hyun, and Manato Ushiyama—drew on EEG biosensors to identify stress levels/brainwave activity and transmit harmonic data.

"This was a bone-conducting, brain synchronizing, wearable device, which picks up brainwaves and emotional cues from one person, listening to a certain track here in L.A. and sending those digital files, with a prompt to listen to the same music, to someone they love, bringing them into a shared experience state," explained Hofmann. "It was a beautiful form factor with truly compelling ideas behind it. That's what we do here."

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As we walked back down the hallway, Hofmann pointed out the prototypes from current final year students in the lobby exhibition area. "We don't just want our students to go out and get great design jobs—we want them to bring exceptionally well-thought-out ideas to the world and make things that people have never seen before."

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